Bob Dylan (39 page)

I began to fantasize how I might explain. There’s a plaque a few steps from the door of 5 1/2, dedicated to Henry Atkins, the designer who created the neighborhood in 1909. So I would say, “Hello. I wonder if you know who used to live in your apartment. See that plaque over there—well, there ought to be a plaque for this man. You see, he did—remarkable things.” No, that wasn’t going to work. It already sounded as if I was recruiting for a new cult. A better idea: take a copy of the thing. Hold it up. “This is a collection of old American music. Just this year,” I could say (referring to the London art curator Mark Francis), “a man speaking in Paris said that only James Joyce could remotely touch this collection as a key to modern memory. And it all came together right here, in your apartment. I just wanted to let whoever was living here now know that.”

After a few weeks this fantasy took a turn and tripped me up. I’d offer the
Anthology,
then walk away, good deed accomplished—but then the person would ask a question. “Sounds really interesting,” she’d say. “What’s it about?”

Well, what is it about? How do you explain—not only to someone who’s never heard the
Anthology,
never heard of it, but to yourself, especially if you’ve been listening to Smith’s book of
spells for years or decades? An answer came right out of the air: “Dead presidents,” I’d say. “Dead dogs, dead children, dead lovers, dead murderers, dead heroes, and how good it is to be alive.”

 

 

That sounded right the first time it ran through my head; it sounded ridiculously slick after that. I realized I had no idea what Harry Smith’s collection was about. When, in the fall of 2000, I taught a faculty seminar on the
Anthology,
including what for decades had seemed the apocryphal Volume 4, Smith’s assemblage of mostly Depression-era records, finally released that same year on the late John Fahey’s Revenant label, I realized I had no idea what it was. A group of professors—from the English, German, Philosophy, Music, History, American Studies and Art History departments—sat around a table. Their assignment had been to listen to the CDs; I asked each to pick the song he or she most liked. “The song about the dog,” one woman said, referring to Jim Jackson’s 1928 “Old Dog Blue.” “Why?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said, just like any listener. “I played the records when I was doing the dishes, and that one just stuck.” There were several votes for “the Cajun songs”—for Delmar Lachney and Blind Uncle Gaspard’s “La Danseuse,” Columbus Fruge’s “Saut Crapaud,” both from 1929, and Breaux Freres’s 1933 “Home Sweet Home”—names and titles that in thirty years of listening to the original anthology—but, obviously, not altogether hearing it—I’d never registered.

To these new listeners, these performances—all from “Social Music,” the part that in the 1960s people usually found least appealing—leaped right out. I was disappointed no one mentioned Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” the most seductively unsolvable song I’ve ever heard, or Richard “Rabbit” Brown’s 1927 “James Alley Blues,” which I think is the greatest record ever made. Well, I thought, there’s no accounting for taste. And they don’t really
know
this stuff—it’s not like I got it the first time through. I did mention “James Alley Blues,” though. “You mean the one that sounds like Cat Stevens?” someone said. I was horrified. I dropped the subject.

The discussion picked up when I asked each person around the table to name the performance he or she most hated. There was a philosophy professor who, when in later meetings we took up Smith’s
Volume 4,
insisted on the instantly unarguable lineage between the Bradley Kincaid of the 1933 “Dog and Gun” and anything by Pat Boone. His first contribution to the seminar was to note “the startling echoes of the Stonemans”—in their 1926 “The Mountaineer’s Courtship” and 1930 “The Spanish Merchant’s Daughter”—“in the early work of the Captain and Tennille.” “Hattie Stoneman,” responded an art history professor, “ought to be drowned.”

An English professor confessed she really couldn’t stand the “flatness of the voices”—she meant the Appalachian voices, Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, the Carter Family, G. B. Grayson, Charlie Poole, Lunsford. “What’s that about?’” she said. “What’s it for?” “Maybe it’s a kind of disinterest,” a young musicology professor said. “Everybody knows these songs, they’ve heard them all their lives. So they’re bored with them.” “It’s like they don’t care if anyone’s listening or not,” said the first professor. “Maybe that’s what I don’t like. As if we’re not needed.” “I don’t think that’s it,” said a German professor, who, it turned out, had grown up in the Kentucky mountains. “It’s fatalism. It’s powerlessness. It’s the belief that nothing you can do will ever change anything, including singing a song. So you’re right, in a way—it doesn’t matter if you’re listening or not. The world won’t be different when the song is over no matter how the song is sung, or how many people hear it.”

“Uncle Dave Macon isn’t like that,” someone said of the Grand Ole Opry’s favorite uncle. “No,” the let’s-drown-Hattie-Stoneman professor said, “he’s
satanic.
”

I realized I was completely out of my depth—or that Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music
had opened up into a country altogether different from any I’d ever found in it. “It’s that ‘Kill yourself!’” another person said, picking up on the notion, and quickly it seemed as if everyone in the room saw horns coming out of the head of the kindly old banjo player, saw his buck-dancer’s clogs replaced by cloven hoofs. They were talking about his 1926
“Way Down the Old Plank Road,” one of the most celebratory, ecstatic, unburdened shouts America has ever thrown up. Where’s the devil?

“Kill yourself!” Uncle Dave Macon yells in the middle of the song, after a verse, taken from “The Coo Coo,” about building a scaffold on a mountain just to see the girls pass by, after a commonplace verse about how his wife died on Friday and he got married again on Monday. “Kill yourself!’” He meant, it had always seemed obvious to me—well, actually, it was never obvious. He meant when life is this good it can’t get any better so you might as well—kill yourself? Does that follow? Maybe he’s saying nothing more than “Scream and shout, knock yourself out,” “Shake it don’t break it,” or for that matter “Love conquers all.”

That’s not how he sounds, though. He sounds huge, like some pagan god rising over whatever scene he’s describing, not master of the revels but a judge. “Uncle Dave seems much too
satisfied
about the prospect of apocalypse,” the agent-of-satan advocate said. Everyone was nodding, and for a moment I heard it too: Uncle Dave Macon wants you dead. I heard what was really satanic about the moment: when Macon says “Kill yourself!” it sounds like a good idea—really
fun.
And you can hear the same thing in “The Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train,” which Harry Smith slotted into his
Volume 4.
It was 1930, and Macon compressed as much journalistic information as there is in Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” into just over a third of the time, dancing through the financial ruins of his state—the phony bond issue, the collapsed banks, the stolen funds—while crying “Follow me, good people, we’re bound for the Promised Land” over and over. “Kill yourself!” This is what the devil would sound like singing “Sympathy for the Devil”: correct.

Hearing Macon this way was like hearing Bob Dylan’s one-time sidekick Bob Neuwirth’s version of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.” Thanks to Harry Smith, the song was a commonplace in Greenwich Village: in 1966 Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s lines “A railroad man, he’ll kill you when he can / And drink up your blood like wine” turned up in Bob Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again.” Neuwirth sang the song’s most mysterious lyric, “I wish I was a
lizard in the spring,” as “I wish I was a lizard in your spring.” Oh. Right, Sure. Obvious.

In most of the vast amount of commentary that greeted the reissue of the
Anthology of American Folk Music
in 1997, the music was taken as a canon, and the performers as exemplars of the folk. Neither of these notions had reached the room we were in. There people were arguing with Uncle Dave Macon, not with whatever tradition he might represent. It was Hattie Stoneman who had to be drowned, not white Virginia country women in general. There was no need to be respectful of a song if you didn’t like it.

In 1940, folklorists Frank and Anne Warner taped the North Carolina singer Frank Proffitt’s offering of a local Wilkes Country ballad called “Tom Dooley,” about the nineteenth-century murder of one Laura Foster by her former lover, Tom Dula, and his new lover, Annie Melton. The song travelled, and in 1958 the Kingston Trio, a collegiate group from Menlo Park, California—my home town, as it happened, and in 1958 the most comfortable, cruising-the-strip postwar suburb town imaginable—made the song number one in the country.
¹⁸
The whole story is in Robert Cantwell’s book on the folk revival,
When We Were Good
—or at least the story up to 1996, when the book was published.

In 2000, Appleseed Records released
Nothing Seems Better to Me,
a volume of field recordings made by the Warners, featuring Frank Proffitt. The liner notes included a letter from Proffitt, written in 1959. “I got a television set for the kids,” he wrote.

This is the classic sixties account of what folk music is, how it works, how it is seized by the dominant discourse of the time and turned into a soulless commodity—the classic account of who the folk are, of how, even when everything they have is taken from them, their essential goodness remains. As Faulkner put it at the end of
The Sound and the Fury,
summing up the fate of his characters, naming the black servant Dilsey but at the same time dissolving her into her people, her kind of folk: “They endured.”

There wasn’t any
they
in the seminar room as the Smith records were passed around the table. The all-encompassing piety of Frank Proffitt’s letter—a letter which, I have to say, I don’t believe for a moment, which reads as if it could have been cooked up by a Popular Front folklorist in 1937, which is just too ideologically perfect to be true—would never have survived the discussion that took place there. It wouldn’t have gotten a word in.

I went home and put the
Anthology
on. I had read somewhere that, in the fifties, the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank used to listen to the twentieth song on the “Social Music” discs, the Memphis Sanctified Singers’ 1929 “He Got Better Things for You,” over and over, as if there didn’t need to be any other music in the world. I’d tried to hear something of what he must have heard; I never could. But this day it was all there—as if, again, it had all been obvious.

Smith hadn’t credited the singers individually, no doubt because he couldn’t find their names. In the supplemental notes to the 1997
reissue by the folklorist Jeff Place, you find them: Bessie Johnson, leading, followed by Melinda Taylor and Sally Sumner, with Will Shade, of the Memphis Jug Band, on guitar. Johnson starts out deliberately, with small, measured steps. “Kind friends, I want to tell you,” she says in a friendly way. Then her almost mannish vibrato deepens; it’s getting rougher, harder, with every pace. When she says “Jesus Christ, my savior,” he’s hers, not yours. Her throat seems to shred. With that roughness, and the roughness of the words that follow—“He got the Holy Ghost and the fire”—right away it’s an angry God that’s staring you in the face. Uncle Dave Macon, agent of Satan? This is much scarier. But then, as the first verse is ending, the whole performance, the whole world, seems to drop back, to drop down, to almost take it all back, the threat, the rebuke, the condemnation. Every word is made to stand out starkly, right up to the point of the title phrase. “He got better things for you”—the phrase seems to slide off Bessie Johnson’s tongue, to disappear in the air, leaving only the suggestion that if you listened all the way into this song your life would be completely transformed.

The
Anthology of American Folk Music
had been turned upside down and inside out, that was for sure. I was still certain that Rabbit Brown’s “James Alley Blues” was the greatest record ever made, but now another performance I’d never really noticed before, the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers’ 1928 “Rocky Road,” suddenly stood out. It wasn’t a record, it was a children’s crusade. On the
Anthology,
the spiritual “Present Days,” the same group’s recording from the same year, has a deep, mature bass, a reedy lead by a man you can see as the town barber, then a farmer or a preacher taking the most expansive moments of the tune, their wives filling out the music. The piece goes on too long—you hear how well they know the number, how complete it is, how finished. It’s a professional piece of work. But in “Rocky Road”—“Ohhhhhh-La la / La la/La la la,” ten or twenty or a hundred kids seem to be chanting while circle-dancing in a field on the edge of a cliff. As if it were something by Little Richard and I was eleven, I didn’t hear an English word, or want to. You didn’t need to know a language to hear this
music; it taught you. Not that it had ever taught me a thing before. You have to be ready to accept God, songs like this say; you have to be ready to hear songs.